New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  “Maybe. Ignatius is here. It’s not busy. Let me see if he’ll let me go for a bit. Wait.” And Proteus popped back into the coffee shop, the screen door slamming behind him, to emerge some moments later looking no less confused than when he’d gone in, but ready. “He’s being pissy, but he let me off my leash. Let’s go before he changes his mind.”

  The two walked up the hill, past the shops and the ruins of shops, where a stray golden retriever approached them from across the street, barked once, then trotted off in retreat as Proteus bent down to ruffle his ears. “You don’t have your magic with you,” Amanda said.

  “What? No. What? The magic? Yes, I don’t carry that with me. Not always. It’s too much trouble to keep track of all that… all those… those things, you know. You always have to do something with them. Put them here or there, wherever. Always have to account for them. It’s too much…”

  “But how else will you stay protected?”

  “Protected? Against what?”

  “Okay, then how will you protect? How will you serve and protect, if you haven’t got your magic sword? Your lion’s mane? Your shield?”

  “I swear, you’re more insane than I am.”

  “I’m asking you practical questions. He used to wear them. He always had them on and they were always with him.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “There was never a question of where some particular item was, or what to do with it. It was always right there.”

  “Am I going to regret coming with you?”

  She pouted. “Now you’re just being hurtful. And besides, I was only kidding. Look, it’s not much further.”

  “It never is, not in this town. Everything is all of two blocks away.” They continued up the hill, up the steep inclines, taking turns at elbows of corners where the streets ran not quite straight, and then, to the one-lane switchback departing the highway, that led… “Where are we going?”

  “The top of the hill.”

  “The mountain’s peak?”

  “That’s where it is. You’ve never seen it?”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “The center of power. Where the magic has its source.”

  “I don’t know about this.”

  “Then you should. That’s why I’m taking you. Relax, it’s not much further.”

  “Nothing ever is,” he said, “except… except when it is.”

  •

  “We’re here,” Amanda said. “This is it.”

  The top of Charles Mountain may have been a bit of a disappointment to one expecting snow-covered alpine peaks, sheer rock faces, jagged and treacherous cliffs with nosebleed-inducing drop-offs into certain death. This was just a rocky bump beside the narrow road, more a pile of gravel than anything, and beside it stood the box-like station of the police. The police station.

  “Yes,” Proteus nodded. “Yes, I see. This is good.”

  “Power protects, Proteus. It protects and it creates. You have to understand this. Everything else is death.”

  The police station was a miserable box built of cinderblock and painted gray, more or less the size of a one-room apartment. It had one door and one window beside the door, and some kind of heavy antenna arrangement on the roof.

  “It feels the heartbeat of all the world.”

  “Amanda, you knew Sheriff Friendly well,” he stated, though the implied question was evident.

  “By ‘well’ you mean…”

  “That you were familiar.”

  “And by ‘familiar’?”

  “Never mind.”

  They both stared toward the little building, the sad but solid little station on the mountain. It could have been a baby raccoon, or a fawn in the forest. Amanda loved it. Proteus remained pensive. Both, in their way, were held by the sight.

  “Come on,” she told him, “you have to see inside!” She took his loose left hand and led him ahead.

  They approached the building, crossing over the unpaved front parking lot which contained nothing but dirt, the single sheriff’s Jeep having disappeared with the sheriff himself. “Go on,” she urged him at the door. So Proteus gripped the knob with his hand and cautiously turned it. It wasn’t locked. It popped open with ease.

  Inside was a neat, if stale-smelling room with a desk and a phone and a radio unit (which would explain the antenna on the roof), also a cage in one corner, apparently the jail. There was a calendar on the wall beside the desk, still hung at October, the month previous, with a picture of a girl in a scant bikini.

  “Not much to it,” Proteus declared.

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “I guess that I am.”

  She gestured toward the rolling chair at the desk. “If you had the instruments of power with you, when you sat in the seat of power, it would be different. As it is… well, it will be different, but you should still get some of the magic, I should think. Give it a try.”

  “At the desk?”

  “Right.”

  “In the chair?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  He studied the arrangement and saw no harm in it. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll do what you tell me.” This seemed to make her happy.

  He felt awkward approaching the swivel chair. It was clearly an older model, heavy and well-worn, that had either been in the station for many years or was picked up in a garage sale for a dollar. As he sat his weight into it, the thing creaked. It had only one arm, the other broken off or disconnected, and it seemed to want to roll out from under him, though it didn’t actually do that. Strangely, he found this chair especially comfortable, welcoming even.

  “Yes,” he said, first to himself and then to her, “yes, that’s nice. I think I see what you mean. This changes nothing, though. I’m no sheriff. I don’t want to be and I’m not the least bit qualified. Besides, wouldn’t the town need to hold an election? I don’t know, but I don’t think you just become sheriff.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I’m not especially. I’ve told you, I’m not interested.”

  “Don’t worry about that either. Just feel the power. You’ll know what you need to do. I have to get going now. I need to be at work. But you should just sit there for a moment and see what comes to you. Wait for a vision. Whatever.”

  “Whatever. Good. Yes.”

  “I will see you, Proteus. Come by the restaurant later, after you’ve closed up. I’ll fix you up some pancakes.” She smiled at him briefly, then turned and was gone, leaving Proteus alone at the sheriff’s desk.

  The wind, light as it was, at the corners of the building and through its gaps blew a noise like a small and wailing voice, like a small and saddened ghost. He looked up at the girl-calendar beside him. The model’s lean body glistened with oil under a tropical sun in four-color process. Proteus then laid both his hands, palms down, onto the surface of the desk and felt that it was solid, its cold metal certainty underneath the cardboard blotter. This was a thing.

  Beside the door stood an empty coat rack, hooks and hooklets reaching up like flowers toward the ceiling.

  The room was still, revealed throughout by an even light, the early afternoon sun scattered by thin clouds. As the clouds passed away, the light brightened; it also produced shadows. As clouds passed over, the light dimmed; the shadows grew less defined, equalized with the ambient luminance.

  Was there someone in the cage?

  He looked at the cage. There was not.

  He took his hands off the desk and felt underneath, found the drawer and pulled it open. Laid over pens and pencil stubs and loose paperclips by the dozens, there was a spiral-bound notebook, marked on its blue cover with only the dates: “07/05–10/05.” This was handwritten in marker, in perfect block type. He took it out. He opened it, looked at the first page, then flipped through the whole of it. Inside, covering every single page, was the same perfect, block script, so tiny as to fit two lines within each printed line. The white spacings between were pe
rfectly even, absolutely parallel, as if drawn by a machine.

  Proteus flipped back to a page at random and read, leaning in and squinting: “I wondered if there were someone in the jail. But why would I think that? I knew perfectly well there wasn’t. Because if there had been, it would’ve been me who’d put them there, so I would know. Right? And so I looked at the cage – I got up and walked over, wrapped my fingers around the slats and peered inside, to where it was especially dark. Of course there was no one there. Not really.”

  He fumbled spastically to slam shut the notebook as fast as he could and threw it back into the drawer, where it flopped down like a dead fish. The drawer stuck as he tried to shut it. He hit it with the palms of both hands, and next he got up and kicked it, but the drawer was jammed and still wouldn’t close. Finally, once he’d recovered his senses, he calmly squared up both sides of it with his hands to each out-stuck edge and gave the drawer a gentle push, which returned it flush and shut. He stood panting. His face had grown hot, his palms sweating.

  What had that meant, “Not really”?

  The jail stood empty, now especially dark.

  Proteus very carefully approached the jailbox; he crept warily toward the cage like a cat stalking a bird – one toe-step, silent as possible, another toe-step, the gentle shifting of the weight, forward… When he reached it, he wrapped his fingers around the iron crossways slats and looked in… and looked in, to where it was darkest…

  •

  Ignatius said, “More and more, every time now I look at you, you’ve got that look. That same, lost look. Where have you gone? Eh? I don’t know what you’ve stuck your nose into this time, or what that look on your face is about, but it’s time, seems to me, you snap out of it. What do you think? Don’t you agree?” He snapped his fingers in front of Proteus’s staring face: click click. “You see, I need your help closing the shop. I need your help with roasting the coffee. I need you here, as much as you can be. Proteus…” Click, click click. Snapping the fingers again, as if grown curious at the sound of it himself, not certain anymore what he was doing it for. “In the world. Right here.”

  “Is everything haunted?” Proteus asked at last, his thousand yards shortening some, returning a little to himself.

  “Yes, everything is haunted. What do you expect? In a place like this? Everything is haunted.”

  “Of course. I suppose. What? What do you want?” Ignatius sighed deeply, looked dolefully at his employee.

  “What?”

  “How long have you worked for me, Mr. Proteus?” he asked.

  “For as long as I’ve been here. I don’t know. Three weeks?”

  “And do you know why I hired you?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly. Neither do I. There is no good reason for it. My customer base has been reduced by half in the past year – you know how this happened. I’ve thought, sometimes, I should just walk away from this. Never look again. I can’t afford you. I can’t afford anything. Yes, I should just walk away. But instead, I hired you. I hired another person, an employee. You understand, I’ve never had an employee before. Never needed one. And now, half the business, half the work, half the money, the same overhead, and now I have an employee. For what? I keep asking myself this, for what?”

  “So… why did you hire me?”

  “Honestly, I don’t believe that I did. As far as I can remember, I just looked up one day and you were there, at the machine, roasting the coffee for the next week. Nobody hired you. You were just there.”

  “My own memory…” Proteus looked toward the roaster. It reminded him of an old steam locomotive engine.

  “It grows dim, doesn’t it?” Ignatius finished for him. “You don’t know how you got here any better than I do. And yet, here you are.”

  “Your money is good. It isn’t much, but it spends.”

  “You are good at your job. Even if you are always thousand-yard-staring. Even if your soul has gone missing. You are here, but you are not here. And I am obliged to ask, if only of myself, where did you learn this? Who taught you, this roasting of the coffee?”

  “I… it was… a thing that… I just…”

  “Of course, yes, of course. You just understood what it was that needed to be done. You were informed. By the spirits, was it? You can tell me. I would believe it. I will believe anything, the more absurd the better. My father Inigo taught me, in Madrid, when I was a boy, how to roast. His father Inigo taught him. Etcetera. My family has always roasted the coffee, for as long as there has been coffee in Spain. Yet nobody talks about coffee in Spain, and why would they? Coffee in Italy everybody knows about. Famous, all the world. But Spanish coffee is a secret, a complete unknown. It is this way for a reason. I won’t tell you the reason because this is secret too. But who teaches you? Is it the coffee itself?”

  Proteus looked about the deserted coffee shop, closed now for business and dark. Dark, as the outer darkness of late autumnal afternoon outside approached and equalized itself to the ambient, inner darkness, reaching toward its level so that it almost made sense. “Well,” he said, “kind of, yes.”

  Ignatius nodded significantly to himself. “I told you I would believe you, and I will keep my promise.”

  “No, look, really…” Proteus approached the machine at the furthest corner, under its little light. “Look.” He touched the side of the drum, then let his hand follow down the metal to where the controls lay displayed on an upraised panel. He switched the motor on and the machine began to rumble, turning the inner drum. He lit the burner and it made a deep sound like wind. “Look, I… this thing…” Another switch started the blower, and then it really was wind, drawn into the machine from the cooling trough.

  “Generations,” said Ignatius.

  “No one denies this,” protested Proteus. “Nobody could.”

  “Nobody? And yet, you…”

  “I? No. Yes! I…” And as he spoke, he busily scooped out great metal scoopfuls of green coffee beans from a burlap bag, filling a plastic bucket to its marked volume. He upturned this bucket into the funnel (which to his mind resembled the locomotive’s smokestack) on top of the machine, then measured out another such bucket and did the same.

  “A person who is not even here.”

  “That’s not… no… Listen! It’s the beans themselves, as you say. I listen to them. So do you! So do you! I know this… I listen; they speak.”

  “They are making the cracking noise.”

  “They are. They will. That is their voice. That is what they speak with. First, the moisture escapes and there is steam. Sugars internal to the bean caramelize. They crack. That’s the first crack.”

  “My brother is a monk, just like you were, only he is a Dominican. He stares at Dominican walls. You stare at Zen walls. He tells me it is the same, there is no difference.”

  The inner drum of the machine grew hot. Proteus watched and waited, observing the thermometer’s crawl. “It is the first ecstasy. The discipline is to prolong this ecstasy without losing it… to carefully sustain… Listen! When the second crack…”

  “He tells me what he sees in these walls. It is always God.”

  “If the first crack is approached too quickly, it rolls along, its momentum carries it forward straight into the next, it gets away from you. You’ve lost it then. It is only just ready, and nothing else. There is no beauty.”

  “He tells me he only grudgingly retains any self.”

  “So you need to adjust the temperature very carefully, to just sustain this momentum, but not lose it. If you go too low, you lose it. Then it’s lost.”

  “The temptation is to dissolve the self completely in God. He says this is possible.”

  “And the second crack… the sugars, the development of the oils, the cellular structure…” Hot enough now, he released the beans from the hopper above into the rotating drum, where they entered with a noise like a waterfall. He watched the temperature drop.

  “And you tell me that no one but the bean
s themselves… And I am obliged to believe. Though I don’t understand why you are here.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Here, without being here.”

  “No! Because… Listen! In a few minutes… four and a half minutes, precisely, then it begins. You, yourself, you know this!” He watched a digital timer counting off from the moment of insertion, then looked down to the burner’s flame, visible through a hole in the side of the machine, and made a small adjustment to it, nudging the control lever with the palm of his hand. “You know this,” he said again, though he did not see the owner leave, only sensed himself alone.

  •

  Outside of Lorelei’s, as much a glass and chrome approximation of a railcar-cum-east-coast-diner as local building codes would allow, Proteus stood for a moment on the broken sidewalk and looked in. Amanda, on the other side of the wide, glass windows, hadn’t seen him yet, and he watched her move inside, making her circuit about the occupied booths and tables, a simple white apron wrapped over her street clothes. There were only a handful of customers inside: a family of three, an older couple, a single at the counter. The interior blazed brightly, flooded in light and reflective surfaces. Beside Lorelei’s stood the somewhat more active local, the Tooth Or Claw, it’s front door open (though it would soon enough stand shut against the evening cold), its windows hung with the obligatory neon signs.

  She’d noticed him; she waved. He waved back and entered through the glass door. “You’ve been roasting coffee,” she greeted him, smiling. “I can smell it. It clings to you.”

  “Mm.”

  “I like the smell.”

  He let her lead him in toward an empty booth not far from the kitchen in back. “Not everyone does. Some people think it smells like burnt tires.”

  “Not me. Here, sit. I won’t bring you a menu because I already know what you need. Pancakes!”

  “Right, there. Who’s up tonight?” Proteus, with his eyebrows, indicated the kitchen.

  “He seems human enough, sentient at least, but I’ll need to make sure he understands the concept. Eggs too, I suppose? Scrambled?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did you think of that thing I showed you? That place? The police station. Were you able to find anything there that could help?”